Trapped, Pt.1

Broadcast: 01/04/2014

Reporter: Eric Campbell

On Australia Day 2009, Australian property executive Marcus Lee was thrown into a seething, violent Dubai jail and nearly died. Nine months later he emerged accused of a crime he says he never committed. Despite his confidence of innocence and the wholesale lack of compelling evidence against him it took the better part of five years, trapped in Dubai, to shake the charge and the threat of a much longer prison stretch and get back to Australia.

During that time he lost his house, his step-father, his grandmother and couldn’t return for their funerals.

During much of that time Marcus and Julie Lee permitted Foreign Correspondent to follow their paralysing plight. Now they’re clear of Dubai and back home, they’re free to tell their story.

They were locked in Dubai’s archaic and sclerotic court system – the same system that’s jailed foreigners for overt expressions of affection and rape victims ahead of their assailants. But the Lees were fighting accusations that he was part of a multi-million dollar sting involving a prize waterfront property. In Dubai financial crime is considered among the worst. Even bouncing a cheque equals prison time.

Marcus Lee was implicated by authorities in a highly contentious deal involving his boss at Dubai developer Nakheel, Australian Matt Joyce, another Australian businessman named Angus Reed and well known Australian property developer Sunland. Lee, Joyce and Reed were accused of fleecing Sunland of 14 million dollars when it bought a prize chunk of the massive Dubai Waterfront development.

While Dubai authorities were tenacious in their pursuit of the three it turns out Sunland was propelling much of the legal action that kept Lee and Joyce pinned down in Dubai for years. Legal action that ultimately failed and that even drew stinging criticism from a senior Australian court.

In the end Marcus Lee was collateral damage in a brawl between property developers.

Part 1 of this Foreign Correspondent special report goes deep inside Dubai’s capricious justice system. For four years, The Foreign Correspondent team tracks Marcus Lee and Julie Lee’s progress as they face each hurdle. At times, there is only despair and hopelessness but with the support for family and a resolute Australian lawyer they fought on in incredibly difficult circumstances.

But the saga does not end there. Trapped Part 2 will explore the infamous land deal, investigate key players and expose a paper trail which raises new and serious questions about the affair.__________________________________

Transcript

CAMPBELL: It’s a Middle Eastern patch of sand that promises the best of everything, from hotels and shopping to vibrant nightlife. In one generation Dubai’s transformed itself from an Arab fishing village, into an international travel hub for business and pleasure.

JOHN SNEDDON: “If you fly into Dubai today, it looks like a Middle Eastern version of Las Vegas or Surfers Paradise”.

CAMPBELL: But behind the flashy façade, are some brutal traps for the unsuspecting.

JOHN SNEDDON: “Qantas is now diverting hundreds of thousands of Australians through Dubai on their way to Europe but what you don’t see in the Qantas brochures is an explanation of what can happen to you in Dubai. A young Australian couple sharing a hotel room can be arrested for adultery. If that couple are homosexuals, the consequences are even more severe. There’ve been women who’ve been gang raped there who have then been convicted of engaging in adultery and had prison terms imposed upon them. It may look like a Middle Eastern version of Las Vegas but it’s very far from that”.

CAMPBELL: The glittering miracle city has a legal system anchored in the Dark Ages. Justice can be cruel and capricious. Guilt or innocence can be arbitrary. And in a land where money is king, some of the worst crimes are financial. Find yourself accused of fraud or even bouncing a cheque and you’re in for a rough ride even if you’re innocent.

MARCUS LEE: “Thrust in through the front door with a few people yelling at you as you’re entering, ‘good we’ve got some white meat’. You’re certainly.... being an accountant, you’re not really trained for that”.

CAMPBELL: Tonight we go inside the terrifying five year ordeal of Australians caught in the quicksand of Dubai justice.

JULIE LEE: “What can you do? Who do you go to? There was nothing I could do.... nothing”.

CAROL MCKINLEY: “We were all devastated. We couldn’t.... we couldn’t believe that it was actually happening”.

CAMPBELL: [in Dubai] “This story has literally been years in the making. We’ve been following the private agony of an Australian couple caught in a legal nightmare after Dubai’s insane property boom collapsed. What’s happened to them is shocking, but it also had to remain a secret. Now for the first time Marcus and Julie Lee tell their story”.

Four years ago Foreign Correspondent came to Dubai to examine the wreckage of a spectacular commercial crash. The Global Financial Crisis had reached the United Arab Emirates and popped Dubai’s bubble.

CEM BAYULEN: [Turkish businessman] “There are thousands and thousands of unfinished properties lying around on the desert, unattended. People either just dump them or they can’t make the payments. It’s a big dilemma for everybody now”.

CAMPBELL: If you had an inkling of how Dubai deals with financial failure and you had the money for an airfare, you left your expensive car in the airport car park and bolted. One French businessman had even dressed as an Emirati woman to escape a deal gone wrong and fled by boat.

HERVE JAUBERT: [French businessman] “When they put you in jail it’s not for three or five years, they put you in jail until you pay what they want you to pay so if you don’t pay or if you cannot pay – regardless of the reason – they keep you in gaol indefinitely”.

CAMPBELL: And you didn’t have to be in prison to be trapped.

“So this is the room? This is where you all live?”

WORKER: “Yeah, eighteen people living here”.

CAMPBELL: “Eighteen people in this room?”

WORKER: “Yes”.

CAMPBELL: Poor construction workers like these Bangladeshis couldn’t leave Dubai – their passports were in the hands of employers who hadn’t paid wages for six months.

WORKER: “If we complain to the police, they say go to court to get your passports from the company. We don’t have the money. We can’t even afford to take a taxi. Where to go? We don’t know where to go?”

MARCUS LEE: “One day we basically all turned up at work and that night the place had just collapsed overnight. The banks in Dubai basically stopped lending”.

CAMPBELL: Marcus Lee was one of many Australians caught up in the property crash. He was on the management team of a huge waterfront project, owned by the state development company, Nakheel. But he and his wife, Julie Lee, decided to stay, convinced the bad times still held opportunity.

MARCUS LEE: “There’s two things that happen in development. When things are going good there’s a lot of work to do and when things aren’t going good there’s a lot of work to do as well”.

CAMPBELL: It would turn out to be the worst decision of their lives. They were about to become ensnared in a harrowing legal drama over a multi-million dollar property deal. The stakes were huge and so were the players – a billionaire sheik, his all-powerful property company Nakheel and an Australian developer, Sunland.

On Australia Day 2009 police invited Marcus Lee downtown for a few questions.

MARCUS LEE: “Yeah well their first question was, do you know why you’re here? And I said no, I don’t know why I’m here. Then they started to ask me do I know this person and this person and this person, names that I’d never heard of before and certainly people I hadn’t met and I said well no, I don’t know. And then I started to get a little bit concerned where one of the more senior guys looked at me and looked a bit frustrated and said you’re lying. And so I thought at that point yes this is going to be a different day”.

CAMPBELL: Marcus was thrown into a cell at National Security Headquarters, unaware of what he was supposed to have done.

MARCUS LEE: “I was kept in solitary for a bit over two months where I basically didn’t even have a bathroom. We’re back to real basics there. It was a room 2.5 metres by 1.5 metres, it had a bed in it and it had a mattress on building blocks if you call that a bed, had a hole in the bottom of the door where I was fed three times a day and mostly food that I couldn’t eat and basically at that point I was cut off from anybody. Denied legal representation.... denied to contact Julie to at least tell her where I’ve gone, what’s happened and it was just nothing other than torturous conditions”.

CAMPBELL: Julie Lee was at her mother’s 80th birthday party in Australia when she got news of his arrest. She flew straight back but was allowed only a brief phone call once a week.

JULIE LEE: “We’d try and work together and try and say okay be strong, keep going, keep going. And then we’d say okay, they’re taking the phone away and you’d say I love you, I love you. And then that would be it. And then I’d keep trying to find out more information and that was all I’d ever get from Marcus, just those few minutes”.

CAMPBELL: In the filthy conditions and still in the dark about the accusations against him, Marcus soon contracted gastroenteritis and pneumonia, all made worse by severe asthma. Denied proper food and medicine, he fell gravely ill.

MARCUS LEE: “Once you got ill you were on your own. You had to fend for yourself. It was either that or getting moved to the main police hospital which apparently was worse than the detention centre. I got to the point where I had a temperature of about a hundred and three and it was one of those points when delirium sets in and you’re fearful for your life at that point”.

CAMPBELL: When Julie finally saw him, she realised he was dying.

JULIE LEE: “He’d lost about.... over ten per cent of his body weight. This was in seven weeks or less. He was severely dehydrated and there was something else as well.... oh your blood pressure. That’s right, it was extreme”.

MARCUS LEE: “And one of the tests started to, we found out later that I was actually, my body was closing down, relying a lot on its fatty tissue so I was actually starting to urinate blood”.

CAMPBELL: Julie managed to get him antibiotics that saved his life but he was still desperately sick when he was moved from solitary to a general detention centre.

MARCUS LEE: “Yeah well there was everything from petty thieves and cheque bouncers to um.... we had a group of serial killers in there. So to be one of the only westerners - and I think there was about four westerners in there - it was quite a daunting thing to come out of a room where there was severe psychological trauma. I can say that now, like a year and a half down the track”.

CAMPBELL: One of those Westerners was Marcus Lee’s former boss, Matt Joyce - another Australian who’d brought his family to Dubai to ride the boom time. He’d worked with Marcus on the Dubai waterfront project, owned by the state developer Nakheel. But even he couldn’t tell Marcus why they were there.

MATT JOYCE: “No it was very confusing, very confusing. Marcus and I would talk hours at length trying to establish what was going on”.

CAMPBELL: “So you just really had no idea what you were supposed to have done?

MATT JOYCE: “No we got snippets of information, as much as we could and we tried to piece it together, but it was very confusing. We effectively had no idea Eric”.

CAMPBELL: In desperation Julie called Marcus’ oldest friend in Australia, Rosemary Adams – a psychologist and businesswoman with a knack for getting things done. She flew straight to Dubai and went straight to the gaol to see Marcus.

ROSEMARY ADAMS: [Family friend] “He couldn’t walk without holding onto the walls. He’d lost masses of weight. You know he was really thin. His skin was a grey/green colour. It was just horrible cause don’t forget their gaols aren’t, you don’t get out in the air. You don’t see any life or anything. You’re in.... it’s all inside ‘cause it’s forty five degrees outside so you’re in a room, you know with walls, floors and ceilings. Matt..... he was healthier than Marcus but he was obviously very distressed. He was frantic actually at times so he.... ‘cause he was talking to me ‘cause there was a bit where he could, but his wife also visited every day too”.

CAMPBELL: “Yeah so…”.

ROSEMARY ADAMS: “At that stage... the other thing is that none of us knew what was going on. There’s no charges. We didn’t know what it was about”.

CAMPBELL: Two months later and still without charges, Marcus Lee and Matt Joyce were sent to Dubai’s main prison. It was so overcrowded they had to share a bed.

MARCUS LEE: “It was just a riot. It was a 24 hour a day riot and basically when things started to fly you ducked. If you didn’t duck you’d get hit, and just hope you weren’t on side of the other side of some of the fights. But even when I used to call Julie on the telephone sometime a fight would break out and Julie would even be able to hear it on the other end. One of the times actually I was even on a telephone and I got knocked off the telephone and the telephone just left there hanging. Julie could hear this raucous happening in the background of another fight that I wasn’t involved in, but I just got cleaned up in the process and God knows what that was like for Julie to just hear a fight happening on the other end of the prison. And when I’m talking a fight here, there’s no schoolyard pushing – it’s like literally people grabbing whatever they could, metal trays, pipes, anything they can break off, anything. It’s a violent place, a very violent place. And that is largely due to look there’s inactivity, there’s overcrowding. It’s lock down 24 hours a day and everybody’s shovelled into one room – 250 people per room effectively”.

CAMPBELL: Finally, after seven months they found out the charges against them. They were accused of a massive fraud that could see them gaoled for a decade. The Australian company Sunland claimed they had swindled it out of 14 million dollars on a land deal at Dubai Waterfront.

MATT JOYCE: “it was a shock and horror and trying to analyse why, what for. We were just told that, as you said, we’d defrauded them and we didn’t know when or how so that was even worse”.

CAMPBELL: They were desperate to get out of prison and fight the charges but the Australian Government seemed powerless to help. So supporters of Matt Joyce turned to a former Foreign Minister turned consultant for hire.

ALEXANDER DOWNER: [Minister, Foreign Affairs 1996-2007] “So in the end my intervention was with the Crown Prince of the United Arab Emirates who I know and I really asked if he could be released from prison on bail pending the trial”.

CAMPBELL: Alexander Downer’s letter to the Crown Prince, delivered by the Australian Embassy, made no mention of Marcus Lee.

ALEXANDER DOWNER: “I just simply wasn’t approached about him so I simply don’t know about his case”.

JULIE LEE: “He was going to raise the case for the people who were going to pay the $60,000 and we couldn’t afford to pay so we were not involved in that”.

CAMPBELL: “And was any money paid in the end?”

JULIE LEE: “I can’t be sure. I don’t know”.

CAMPBELL: “What was your reaction though to a former Foreign Minister asking for money to raise the case of Australians trapped in this situation?”

JULIE LEE: “I wasn’t that impressed”.

ALEXANDER DOWNER: “I didn’t charge them in the end, no and in any case what’s more it was to be a success fee if memory serves me well and how could I ever prove what contribution I’ve made. The other thing to say about this is, I’m not sure how appropriate it is to collect money doing that sort of thing, so ever since I finished up as the foreign minister I have never been paid for any intervention on a consular issue in that way”.

CAMBPELL: After nine months they were finally released on bail. Marcus managed to put on a smile for his family in Australia but the bail had cost him and Julie everything they had.

MARCUS LEE: “Well we had to basically scrape every bit of savings we possibly could together and credit card and Julie scrambled to put together three hundred thousand Australian dollars and that was to sit bonded in the government and both of my, both Julie and my passports had to be basically handed over”.

CAMPBELL: “You had to surrender her passport?”

MARCUS LEE: “Yes”.

JULIE LEE: “Yes, absolutely. Yes”.

MARCUS LEE: “Julie whilst not being charged or not being even alleged to have committed a crime, is trapped here as well”.

CAMPBELL: Like many expatriates, they had come to Dubai to chase a dream. They’d met in the 1980s when he as a labourer and she was a dancer.

MARCUS LEE: “Like I still remember like at 17 years old to get a 23 year old is a real catch.” [laughs]

CAMPBELL: They put themselves through university in Queensland, graduated as accountants and found work in property firms. In 2006 they decided to try their luck in one of the biggest construction booms in history.

CAMPBELL: “So when you first came here Marcus, there was a bit of a buzz in the place?”

MARCUS LEE: “A buzz? That’s an understatement. It was manic”.

CAMPBELL: The new sheik, Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, had directed the three State development companies to get developing.

MARCUS LEE: “And like one thing he did have was vision. You can’t, you can’t deny that”.

CAMPBELL: “A very big vision”.

MARCUS LEE: “Yeah, yeah”.

CAMPBELL: The idea was to create a new economy of commerce and tourism to replace Dubai’s dwindling oil reserves. Marcus Lee became commercial director on the biggest construction project, Dubai Waterfront.

MARCUS LEE: “Just even to have the opportunity to work on the largest development in the world is an incredible opportunity. And at the same time we were just trying to save enough money to get, to buy a house in Australia and just get that little bit ahead I guess and be able to get a deposit and like a lot of Australians, try to buy a house and own a house in Australia”.

CAMPBELL: Dubai Waterfront was meant to double the city’s size, filling every centimetre of open coastline.

VIDEO: In the world’s fastest growing city, something is happening, something of unprecedented scale, something that will spark the next generation of development. It’s brought to you by Nakheel, where the vision of Dubai gets built.

CAMPBELL: The global financial crisis killed the project stone dead, leaving little more than a pile of sand on the Arabian peninsula.

MARCUS LEE: “There was about 1,500 villas and they were all pre-sold”.

CAMPBELL: “And now there’s just a half -finished bridge”.

MARCUS LEE: “Yeah well two half-finished bridges because in the distance you might be able to see one up there. One was Samsung and one was Tai Say and they were about a billion dollars each”.

CAMPBELL: This was the scene of the alleged crime. In 2007 Sunland decided to buy a land plot here called D17. Its aim was to build a giant twin tower that would dominate the Waterfront. But according to Sunland it was told another Australian company, Prudentia, headed by Melbourne businessman Angus Reed, had negotiating rights to the property - effectively, first dibs.

Based on that understanding, Sunland paid Prudentia $14 million to cede those rights. Sunland was then clear to purchase the plot from Nakheel and it did.

But two years later Sunland became convinced it had been conned into paying that $14 million. It resolved that Prudentia didn’t have a saleable hold on D17 to sell and it accused Angus Reed, Matt Joyce and Marcus Lee of fabricating Prudentia’s interest to get the money. All three men denied any wrongdoing.

“Did you do this?”

MARCUS LEE: “Of course not. Sunland brought it of their own freewill. I was not involved at any time into their arrangements with any other company. Yet, because I wrote a business case report for the board that was approved by the senior management, I’m told.... it’s alleged that I’ve partnered in the so-called crime”.

CAMPBELL: “Did you get any money for this?”

MARCUS LEE: “Not one Dirham”.

CAMPBELL: “Do they acknowledge that?”

MARCUS LEE: “Yes”.

CAMPBELL: “So they acknowledge that you didn’t get any money, you just did your job?”

MARCUS LEE: “Yes”.

CAMPBELL: “But you’re still trapped in this whole investigation”.

MARCUS LEE: “That’s right and that’s the way unfortunately it’s probably going to be until it goes right through the court process”.

CAMPBELL: Back in Australia, Rosemary Adams managed to find a lawyer prepared to help Marcus for free. Brisbane lawyer John Sneddon had no doubt Marcus was innocent but he had no illusions that would free him in a court system that could drag on for years.

JOHN SNEDDON: “Oh it’s a very frightening system. I’ve had so many sleepless nights worrying about what could happen and lawyers like to control things. It’s just ingrained in us and I appreciate that in every case you put your best case forward and then you lose control, it goes.... it’s in the hands of the judge. In this one, I realised I could control so many things but we had no control over the system itself and that’s what was terrifying”.

MARCUS LEE: “Sixth summer here and the third since this happened”.

JULIE LEE: “Yeah. We’ll survive”.

MARCUS LEE: “At least it’s not a summer in a jail”.

CAMPBELL: Marcus and Julie were scared the authorities would punish them if they criticised the system but in 2011 as the trial dragged on interminably, they agreed to talk. Their one condition was that we didn’t broadcast anything until they were safely home. None of us could imagine how long that might take.

MARCUS LEE: “Our lives are on hold. We’re supposed to live on fresh air in the meantime. I haven’t had any income now for two years. We’ve pretty well exhausted every saving”.

JULIE LEE: “All that we worked for”.

MARCUS LEE: “Everything we worked for, every saving, we’ve lost our family home in Australia now and even if I’m acquitted, we’ve still paid a massive penalty”.

CAMPBELL: Marcus and Julie’s families were suffering too. Marcus’ mother, Carol McKinley, lives in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire. She couldn’t tell her own mother of Marcus’ arrest knowing it would be too much for her to bear.

CAROL MCKINLEY: “She was ninety one at that stage and not well. We thought it was better she just didn’t know about it and we would print photos of Marcus and Julie and put them up in the nursing home so..... “Happy Easter Nan” and things like that so she wasn’t aware”.

CAMPBELL: She died without seeing him again. Carol’s second husband Allan, the only father Marcus had ever known was desperate to see him. He was battling cancer.

CAROL MCKINLEY: “My husband when he did pass away he was very distressed at only being able to speak to Marcus once when he was in the hospice. On the day that he was admitted, Marcus rang him on the mobile phone and they said goodbye”.

CAMPBELL: “And he couldn’t, he couldn’t come to the funeral…”

CAROL MCKINLEY: “Sorry”. [upset]

CAMPBELL: “… of course, he couldn’t do anything like that”.

CAROL MCKINLEY: “No”. And they knew that it was the last conversation they’d have”.

NEXT WEEK…

CAMPBELL: “So there’s a few things that start to drive you crazy about Dubai in a while”.

JULIE LEE: “This is just standard. Look he’s still driving over the middle of the road”.

CAMPBELL: Four years into their ordeal and they were going nowhere fast.

MARCUS LEE: “Come on Eric, can you get me in that suitcase you’re leaving with today?

They seem to be able to have as many delays as they want”.

CAMPBELL: And it wasn’t just the foreign legal system they were fighting, the Australian company Sunland was turning the screws from afar.

JOHN SNEDDON: “Sunland sent along their lawyers to thirty court hearings and they would go along and sit in the gallery, sometimes bringing their families like it was a sporting event. Their lawyer at the end of the prosecution case, stood and shouted that Marcus and the other defendant should be convicted and they should be imprisoned and they should be given the maximum gaol term”.

CAMPBELL: Next week, unpicking the infamous deal and chasing the millions.

“Did you keep half the money as they claim?”

MATT JOYCE: “No, that’s one of Sunland’s lies that they continue to push”.

CAMPBELL: “So you wouldn’t be scared of Matt Joyce suing you?”

SOHEIL ABEDIAN: “I’d love that. Please bring it on. Please if you see him, say that is the only message Soheil has for you, bring it on”.

CAMBPELL: Despite their certainty of innocence there were times when Marcus and Julie Lee wondered if they’d ever see Australia again.

ROSEMARY ADAMS: “She rang me one day and said we’re not going to survive. We’ve just got nothing left to give”.